


Telephones and Toaster Ovens

by Dragon_and_a_Fiddle



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, First War with Voldemort, Muggles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-25
Updated: 2017-11-25
Packaged: 2019-02-06 19:22:39
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,563
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12824352
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dragon_and_a_Fiddle/pseuds/Dragon_and_a_Fiddle
Summary: Harry Potter AU in which Lily marries Snape not Potter.  The morning after the wedding, Maid of Honor, Petunia, monologues to the man she spent the night with.





	Telephones and Toaster Ovens

“Do you know what it’s like?” she murmured, staring down through the rippled glass of the window at the garden below, still in disarray from the previous evening’s festivities. “To be the one left behind. Do you have any idea how it feels to wish, to cling to some stupid, vain hope that somehow you’re special, only to discover you’re not?” 

She glanced back over her bare shoulder to the man on the bed. “No,” she said with a shake of her head, answering her own question. “Of course you don’t. You’re special too.” She heard the bitterness in her tone, but had drunk too much wine to care about concealing it. 

Another swallow from the bottle cleared the momentary tightness in her throat. “As a child, she was always so good, so lovely and kind and beautiful. So… perfect. Of course, she would be special. Of course, she had to be something powerful and magnificent. Bloody perfect witch.” 

She leaned against the window frame, careless of her own nudity with nothing but the window, warped with age, to distort the image of her form to those who might appear below. “You can’t know how I wished, how I hoped, dreamed… While she and that boy ran around making flowers bloom and paper birds fly.” She closed her eyes, leaning her forehead against the cool glass. “The beauty of them… 

“And when they took her away to that school… I’d have given anything to go with her. Even without the magic. As I am, ordinary, pathetic as I am, I’d have begged to go with her. Just to see it, just to be there surrounded by all that beauty, all that magic and wonder. If I couldn’t be like her, at least I could have been there to see it. To see Lily bloom.” 

She snorted and turned away from the window, her shoulders braced back against the wall beside it, staring at the opposite wall though she knew he watched her. What did he see when he looked at her? She wondered but didn’t ask. Too uncertain of the answer. 

“It was him that started it, him that first revealed the difference between us. I used to blame him. Hell, maybe I still do. Blame him for taking her away from me. Like somehow if he hadn’t revealed it, it wouldn’t be true.” 

She tipped the bottle, draining the last few drops into her mouth. “I think, maybe they were inevitable. I can’t imagine another way it could have gone. From the moment he took her from me, she was his.” She sighed heavily. “I guess maybe he was hers too. He certainly is now.” 

She let the bottle drop to the floor with a hollow thunk. “Lily Snape. What an awful name.” 

The man on the bed grimaced, but she did not look at him. 

“I’m happy for them. I know this sounds like I’m not. Like I’m the bitter elder sister, the lonely bridesmaid.” She rolled her eyes. “It’s not that at all. Actually, it’s worse than that. I envy you too. All of you. You arrogant idiots who haven’t the faintest clue what you’ve got. 

“You take it for granted, like magic is a given, like it’s just there. Of course you do. For you it is. It always was, is, will be. It’s as normal to you as telephones and toaster ovens.” Finally, she looked at him, naked as she was, lying on his side, propped on one elbow, watching her. “You have no idea what it’s like to peer in from the outside. No idea what I’d give for just a taste of what you have.” 

His gaze was too intense, too hard to meet. 

She looked away again, her eyes drifting over cobwebs someone missed when cleaning the far corner of the room. “For a while, I thought maybe I could lose myself in my ordinariness, maybe if I worked hard enough, I could pretend all that magic I’d glimpsed was just a figment of wild imaginations.” 

She chuckled grimly. “Didn’t work. Actually, I think it made it worse.” 

She glanced toward him again. Why hadn’t he stopped her talking? Why let her keep going? 

“You know I was engaged?” 

In her periphery, he nodded, still silent. 

“He was the epitome of normal, ordinary. That sort of no-nonsense type that’s really just full of their own kind of nonsense, but pretends they’re not. I made the mistake of not telling him beforehand about Lil’s magic.” She paused to consider. “Well, maybe it wasn’t a mistake, but it felt like it at the time. In retrospect, I think that might be what ultimately let me reconcile with my sister, but when it happened, when he stormed out, I thought it might break my heart.” 

She grinned at the ceiling. “It’s telling that it didn’t, really. I mean, there was this vague sense of disappointment, but that was it. No grief, no deep ache in my chest. I had convinced myself I might love him, and all I felt when he left was a mild sort of indigestion.” 

She shook her head. “Good riddance. I’m not sure I’d have liked the person I turned into married to Vernon Dursley. And I’d have lost Lily for good that way. I couldn’t be Mrs. Dursley and Lily Snape’s sister. Not really. Not in any true, honest way. So, I’m grateful to him, for leaving like that.” 

She gave a short, dry laugh. She really wished he would stop her talking. “Of course, that leaves me a muggle among wizards. An uncomfortable place to be, let me tell you. I’m not saying I’d go back. But this… it’s lonely. I can’t settle for ordinary, the way I tried to before. But I’m just… I guess to some I’m a novelty. Like an exotic pet. Something to stare at, to giggle when its behavior baffles.” 

She shoved her blonde hair back out of her face. “I can’t be ordinary, and I’m not magic. So, I’m stuck somewhere in between. Without any place to really belong anymore.” 

He really needed to stop her, but still he made no move to do so. 

“I mean, you slept with me, but what am I to you but an amusing distraction from the fact that you’re still smitten with my sister. You don’t look at me like a person, not really.” 

The alarm in his face was nearly comical. 

“I’m not complaining, mind you,” she assured him. “You’re the same thing to me, in this case. A distraction. I don’t like you nearly enough for this to recur. It’s just an interesting case study, you know. 

“I don’t exist in my own right, not to your mind. I’m just Lily’s muggle sister. Without Lil, I don’t exist. That’s how you wizards seem to think of us. We aren’t real as people, unless given specific context that directly relates to you. Otherwise it’s all abstract.” She waved a hand. “Muggles are just a concept, not something or someone real. Even those of us in on the secret. We’re still mostly just the idea of us. Oh, I know some wizards marry muggles, but too many of you get lost in your own fantastical world, and forget people exist without magic. 

“I don’t blame you, really. I tried my own version of that, after all.” 

She shrugged as she trailed off. “I’ve had a lot to drink. It tends to make me talk too much,” she said by way of apology to the uncomfortable expression on his face. 

“I see that,” he acknowledged, with an awkwardly endearing quirk of his lips. 

Maybe in some other universe, where Lily didn’t marry Severus, maybe there, she might have fallen for that crooked smile, that tousled hair. She shook her head. Her thoughts traveled in strange patterns when drunk. The mere idea of this man in Lily’s bed now that he had shared hers was enough to make her shudder.   
“You haven’t said much,” she commented, turning from her thoughts. 

He shrugged. “Not much to say.” 

“And I’ve talked enough for both of us.” 

“And that,” he agreed with another slightly awkward smile. He crooked his finger, and she pushed herself away from the wall, crossing carefully toward the bed as the room tilted to one side then the other. 

His grin, when she tipped clumsily onto the pillows beside him, brought a warm flush to her cheeks. He leaned over her, kissing along her collarbone.   
“What are you doing?” she murmured, prompting another grin. 

“Providing distraction,” he replied smugly, shifting closer to lay over her. 

A brief thought of refusal flitted through her mind. But why bother? She had lain with him once already the night before, why not now? She sighed and settled back, threading her fingers through his tangle of dark hair, letting his touch set her alight. 

Whether because he was a wizard, or because she knew he was a wizard, there did seem something almost magical, something more than ordinary about his touch, the way he felt moving against her, in her. 

She had to settle for this. Not the sex, not him. But this fleeting connection to their world. To touch and see, but to never really be a part of the magic. 

So be it. 

At least it was better than becoming Mrs. Dursley.


End file.
